Episode #146 – Shannon Mirabelli-Lopez – Cilker School of Art and Design
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Shannon Mirabelli-Lopez, Dean of Cilker School of Art and Design, describes her first impression of West Valley College and its facilities as a “crazy diamond in the middle of what felt like nowhere.” When she joined the community college in 2021, returning home to the Bay Area after two decades in New York City, she was ready for a change and had a vision to democratize a premier arts education.
Mirabelli-Lopez grew up in the East Bay in the ’80s, a punk rocker and later a tour manager, doing distribution and marketing for bands like Primus and styling music videos for Primus, Green Day, and INXS. Researching styles for those music videos led to an interest in history and fashion. She went on to study Anthropology at UC Berkeley and Visual Culture: Costume Studies at NYU, working full-time to get herself through school. That winding path eventually led her to the Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a junior role turned into a 12-year run helping realize major fashion exhibitions.
Yet the prestige came with a cost. “The Met is sort of like a rarefied place,” she says. “It’s very elitist, to be honest, and it just became a little incongruent with how I felt about myself.” A move into leadership roles at Pratt and Parsons revealed another layer: how tuition and debt quietly shape who has access to creative careers. “You cannot be a creative person in New York City starting out the gate with that much debt,” Mirabelli-Lopez says.
At Cilker, she saw a different possibility. Supported by a strong tax base, West Valley can offer in-district students free tuition while maintaining high-quality facilities. Mirabelli-Lopez has used that foundation to tighten the curriculum, launch new offerings in industrial design, digital art and illustration, and curatorial studies, and to reimagine the fashion program so that creativity and craft carry equal weight. “I’m good at creating environments for creative people to do what they do best and not worry about the details,” she says. “That’s what I do as a dean.”
In this conversation, Mirabelli-Lopez traces her journey from punk shows and music videos to the Met, Pratt, and Parsons, and explains why schools like Cilker—where state-of-the-art facilities meet accessible tuition—are crucial in changing the landscape of art and design.
2026 marks the 10th anniversary of the Cilker School of Art and Design and the 5th annual Grad EXPO. The event takes student work out of the classroom and into the public eye through a day of exhibitions, performances, and a live runway show designed to engage the community.
2026 also marks five years of collaborating with Content Magazine to co-produce their summer Pick-Up Party alongside the Grad EXPO. You can read more about the Cilker School of Art and Design, along with profiles of three student alumni, in Issue 18.3, “Perform,” dropping at the EXPO on May 15. Join us to celebrate the school’s first decade and the next generation of Bay Area creatives. Learn more.
Website: westvalley.edu/schools/art-design/
Instagram: @wvccilkersoad | @westvalleycollege
